SanDisk grabs Fusion-io for flash storage expansion

SanDisk is snapping up speed-obsessed flash storage specialist Fusion-io, potentially bringing the company’s high-bandwidth PCIe drives to a broader audience of enthusiasts. The deal, worth $1.1bn in cash, will see Fusion-io’s technology brought in-house at SanDisk, though it’s not been met with universal approval.

In fact, some Fusion-io investors are looking into a potential lawsuit, alleging that the company’s board has acted recklessly and not in the firm’s best interest with the deal agreed.

Whether that’s the case is questionable. Fusion-io has seen five straight quarters of losses, as it struggles to gain sufficient traction with its performance products. Targeted at datacenters and workstations, its products eschew traditional spinning-platter drives for much faster – and much more expensive – solid-state memory.

SanDisk’s hope is that the combination of speedy hardware and its own business scale will turn the losses around.

Whether it will also mean an expansion, eventually, of Fusion-io’s technology into the realm of the enthusiast user remains to be seen. High-performance workstations like Apple’s latest Mac Pro are increasingly demonstrating to regular users the value of an all-flash drive, though for the moment Fusion-io’s technology is well out of the price range of most.